“The air campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has killed more than 450 civilians according to a recent Guardian report, even though the US-led coalition has so far acknowledged just two non-combatant deaths. So why is Facebook not offering an anti-war profile filter? So why is Amazon not offering solidarity to the innocent – Christians and Muslims – killed in Iraq and Syria?”

For some moments of culture and sanity, I went here a day or two after Paris:

My favourite piece of Chopin, because I want a longer argument. The opening (more in some performances) is like being abruptly woken up. Startled into the argument which follows.

Maria João Pires. I agree with the comment on the “plasticity in her phrasing, imaginative approach, control of what she wants to do”. “Not your usual bombastic, jet-propelled mindless virtuoso reading. I love the freer, more contemplative, vividly imaginative approach.”

“Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s antiquities chief, after the destruction of the Baal Shamin temple: ‘All of my memories were torn to shreds; I lost a part of my being. […]’

“Abdulkarim, a university professor in Damascus who has worked pro bono for three years as director of antiquities and museums to preserve Syrian heritage through the war, described the day of the temple’s destruction as ‘dark, sad and frightening’, saying the loss of Palmyra was robbing his work of meaning.”

The Quilliam Foundation, founded by Maajid Nawaz, Rashad Zaman Ali and Ed Husain, critiqued by Robin Yassin-Kassab. This is an old piece (2009), but Quilliam has been in the background of the news again in the past week with the ANZAC plot.

It’s a UK foundation dedicated to “countering extremism”. Many British Muslims will find the piece profoundly irritating, but surely there is gritty truth in it. “A past as a simple-minded extremist is apparently a CV asset.”

You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be –
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste –
O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is’t ye do? what life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?

A Fish Answers

Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
Forever stare! Oh flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.

The Fish Turns into a Man, and then into a Spirit, and again Speaks

Indulge thy smiling scorn, if smiling still,
O man! and loathe, but with a sort of love;
For difference must its use by difference prove,
And, in sweet clang, the spheres with music fill.
One of the spirits am I, that at his will
Live in whate’er has life – fish, eagle, dove –
No hate, no pride, beneath nought, nor above,
A visitor of the rounds of God’s sweet skill.
Man’s life is warm, glad, sad, ’twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves: –
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.”

___

Leigh Hunt’s remarkable The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit (1836), quoted (or most of it) in one of John Julius Norwich’s Crackers (last post but one).

The useless fins, ie arms, are presumably genetically descended from real ones, and the creatures which came out of the sea did have to adapt to breathing sword-sharp air (quite an ordeal), so these lines have an almost, if prematurely, Darwinian feel.

He appends a note:

“As the transition from the ludicrous to the grave, in these verses, might otherwise appear too violent, the reader will permit me to explain how they arose. The first sonnet was suggested by a friend’s laughing at a description I was giving him of the general aspect of fish (in which, by the way, if anybody is curious, let him get acquainted with them in Mr. Yarrell’s excellent work on ‘British Fishes,’ now in course of publication [Yarrell knew Darwin]); the second sonnet, being a lover of fair play, I thought but a just retort to be allowed to those fellow-creatures of ours, who so differ with us in eyeballs and opinions; and the third, not liking to leave a quarrel unsettled, and having a tendency to push a speculation as far as it will go, especially into those calm and heavenward regions from which we always return the better, if we calmly enter them, naturally became as serious as the peace of mind is, with which all speculations conclude that have harmony and lovingness for their real object. The fish, in his retort, speaks too knowingly of his human banterer, for a fish; but it will be seen, that a Spirit animates him for the purpose.”

Image: boingboing.net, artist not stated, but Jessie Willcox Smith, illustration for The Water Babies

Three nourishing Milhaud miniatures for violin and piano, reminiscences from 1945 (opus 256) of his two years (1917-18) at the French legation in Rio under Paul Claudel. They show how, when he wanted to, he could integrate a modern style with the touch of a master of the pre-1914 world.

Danses de jacarémirim. Is the crocodile something in Brazilian folklore? Louis Kaufman, violin, Artur Balsam. Recorded in 1949.

They are from an essential Milhaud LP, or CD reincarnation thereof. I linked to another part of it here. I will return to it. YouTube no longer shows you the duration before you click Play, so I’ll add that this lasts under five minutes.

A few other cultural or historical books or potboilers as editor, co-author or supplier of text or a name; if the hashish, T&H and 100 places titles deserve to be listed, perhaps others do

Forewords etc

___

Since 1970, he has been sending out 20-24 page booklets called A Christmas Cracker – collections of quotations and literary odds and ends – to his friends instead of a Christmas card. Many are easy to find and presumably were printed in editions larger than his Christmas card list. Every ten years, he has made a book out of them.

For the Greek minorities in the interior [1921], nationalism has been a will-o’-the-wisp enticing them to destruction. Yet they, as well as the Smyrniots and Aivaliots [of the coast], have been attracted by it, partly because the latent sense of insecurity, inherent in minorities, makes them susceptible to movements promising cohesion and backing, and blind to their inevitable dangers; partly, too, because of the romantic vein introduced into all modern nationalism through the special circumstances of its origin in the West. Owing to the virtual stability of our linguistic boundaries since the Dark Age […], the romantic appeal to the past is a possible emotional basis in Western Europe for the demarcation of modern national states. Where Frenchmen or Italians held tournaments or built cathedrals in the Middle Ages, there are mostly still French and Italian populations anxious to be citizens of modern France and Italy. But in most parts of Anatolia where in the Middle Ages there were Orthodox Greeks belonging to the Near Eastern world, there are now Middle Eastern Moslem Turks. The continuity has been interrupted [since the Seljuk invasion]; the past offers not foundations but treacherous ruins; and the Greeks make matters worse by digging down below the mediaeval stratum to memories of Ancient Hellenism. For this folly we Westerners are largely to blame, for while we prudently refrain from importing the exploits of Ancient Romans, Gauls, or Goths into our contemporary national politics, and content ourselves with King Alfreds and Hohenstaufens and Joans of Arc, we have taught the unfortunate Greek peasant and merchant to say, parrot-wise, “I am a descendant of Pericles,” like foolish parents who bring up their children to be more affected than themselves. In Anatolia this extravagance is unfortunately encouraged by perpetual suggestion. The country abounds in imposing remains of mediaeval and classical antiquity, and the very stones cry out to any one who is foolish enough to lend an ear. At Kula, certain fragments of sculpture dating respectively from about the sixth century B.C. and the second century after Christ, were pointed out to me as a serious argument for including the town in Greece in 1921. The offensive against Angora [Ankara] was going to “cut the Gordian Knot”; the first day’s advance: inaugurated “a new Catabasis [descent] of Alexander”; the official communiqué ran: “We have occupied Dorylaion (Eski Shehir),” the modern name being added in brackets for the benefit of readers who had not made a profound study of the classical geographers. Political romanticism is essentially unhistorical, being an attempt to telescope past and present into one another, and it has an unlimited capacity for ignoring what is inconvenient. At Gölde [near Kula], the Christians were hyperconscious of the twelfth-century Byzantine church and of the Greek characters carved on the nineteenth century tombstones, but took no account of the equally significant fact that the Greek script now recorded Turkish words. No doubt the Moslems of Gölde, when they go to school in imitation of their Greek neighbours, will claim the church as a monument of Saljuq art and argue that Turkish was the original language of the country, spoken by Lydians and Phrygians and Hittites before their temporary Hellenisation!

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

The ʿAbbasids’ Turkish bodyguard at Baghdad [in the ninth and tenth centuries CE] had its counterpart, at the court of the ʿAbbasids’ Umayyad contemporaries and rivals at Cordova, in a bodyguard of European barbarians who were purchased by the Spanish Caliphs from their Frankish neighbours. The Franks supplied the Cordovan slave-markets by making slave-raids across the opposite frontier of the Frankish dominions [roughly the Iron Curtain]. The barbarians who were thus captured by the Franks in order to be sold to the Spanish Umayyads happened to be Slavs; and this is the origin of the word “slave” in the English language.

Were they already Christian? Did they all become Muslim in Spain? The Arabic word for their Slavic slaves was Saqaliba, a corruption of the Greek Sklavinoi, meaning Slavs. Their presence in the Islamic world was not confined to Spain.

Some Saqaliba became rulers of Muslim taifas after the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba (1031). Muyahid ibn Yusuf ibn Ali freed the Saqaliba of Dénia and established a taifa which extended its reach as far as Majorca.

Hitler conceived of Slavs as a slave population for an eastward-expanding German Reich.

The Orthodox hierarchy was never ready to acknowledge the Papal supremacy in matters of discipline or of doctrine even when it was in desperate need of support against the East Roman Imperial Power. In the last resort the Orthodox hierarchy preferred the political yoke of an Emperor to the ecclesiastical yoke of a Pope if it was driven to make a choice between the two servitudes. On the other hand the Basilian monks, who had no hierarchical considerations to deter them, did not hesitate to place themselves under the banner of the Pope in their struggle against the Iconoclast East Roman Emperors.

Justinian’s Solomonian glory was a luxury out of season which had to be paid for at a fancy price; and, forty-five years after Justinian’s death, a bill of a staggering magnitude was duly presented to the magnificent emperor’s devoted successor Heraclius when he was summoned from Carthage to defend Constantinople against a Persian invader whose advance-guard had by then already pushed its way unhindered right across the Asiatic torso of Justinian’s Mediterranean empire – from the banks of the Khabūr to the shores of the Bosphorus. Heraclius, with his ominous name, is a typical representative of the saviour with the sword in his final appearance on the stage, when the tragic actor once for all lays aside a Jovian mask that has now become utterly incongruous, and once more plays Hêraklês in the only scene that it is any longer possible for even a Hêraklês to play. This scene is the death of a “Die-Hard”; a “Die-Hard” is a soldier who offers up his life for a cause when he is convinced that all but Honour is already lost; and, as a classic example of the type, the Roman Emperor Heraclius is worthy to rank with the British Colonel Inglis whose call to his men first put the phrase into currency.

The Khabūr is the largest perennial tributary to the Euphrates in Syrian territory. Its source, like that of the Euphrates, is in Turkey.

“It is marvellous expanding one’s comprehension like this – it gives one’s ‘historical imagination’ real strong meat to crunch. Pompeii may be more perfectly preserved – but that is a shoddy watering place of the first century A.D. – while the place I am in now was the chief mart of the world for a century: here one is at the centre of things (even if there are boats to Mykonos only twice a week).”

The tiny Cycladic island was the meeting place of the Delian League, the Athens-dominated union against Persia, 478-404.

But the century to which Toynbee is referring must be from 166 BC, when the Romans made Delos into a free port in order to punish Rhodes, to 69, when it was sacked by pirates. Delos is now almost uninhabited, but then supported a population of 30,000: Greeks, Italians, Phoenicians, Syrians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Jews and Persians who came to trade without risk to life or property.

The Greeks and Their Heritages, OUP, 1981 (nearly 400 pages, posthumous, finished in 1974 and published in the year of Greece’s EU accession)

Hellenism, of course, covers Rome too. Constantine Porphyrogenitus belongs to Byzantine, not classical, studies. The Greeks and Their Heritages takes us forward into modern times. Some Problems of Greek History is the only book entirely about ancient Greece.

You could drop Hellenism as being a mere introduction and speak of a quartet of large-scale Greek or Roman works published from the age of 76, with the first book really about his main subject published at the age of 80.

Although Some Problems of Greek History is long, the description “large-scale” perhaps does not even suit such a technical and minutely specialised series of essays.

The masterpiece, by all accounts, is Hannibal’s Legacy, although its thesis (link to a good summary) is controversial. Toynbee intended it as his monument alongside A Study of History.

Constantine Porphyrogenitus is a great achievement marred by comparatively weak treatment of the Byzantine church.

Having been a backpacker in Greece for nearly a year, he should probably have produced a modern Pausanias.

In the language of Arabic political geography, the Maghrib (i.e., “the West”) means in a general way the whole of the Arabic World west of Egypt, though the term is apt to be confined to the Arabic domain in North-West Africa to the exclusion of the Arabic domain in the Iberian Peninsula (Andalūs). Maghrib al-Aqsā (i.e., “the Far West”) means Morocco. Ifriqīyah (an Arabization of the Latin name “Africa”) means a region of rather wider extent than the modern Tunisia in which urban and agricultural life had the ascendancy over Nomadism. The successive capitals of Ifriqīyah have been Carthage, Qayrawān [Kairouan], Mahdīyah [Mahdia], and Tunis.

Carthage was capital of the Vandal Kingdom for most (439-534) of the Kingdom’s existence (435-534). It remained the capital of the Byzantine province (534-698), called Exarchate of Africa from c 585.

The early Moslem capital was Kairouan.

The Fatimids (909-1171) founded Mahdia in 921.

Tunis took over during the subsequent Almohad era. The Sunni Almohad Caliphate was the Mahgrebian successor of the Ismaili Shiite Fatimid Caliphate. Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty was its successor in Egypt and the Levant.

Rurik or Riurik (lived 830-c 879) was the Viking, or Varangian, chieftain who gained control of Ladoga in 862, built Holmgard or Novgorod on the Volkhov and founded the Rurik dynasty.

In 882 his successor Oleg moved the capital south to Kiev on the Dnieper.

In the late 980s, Vladimir the Great was baptised at Chersonesos on the Black Sea and proceeded to baptise his family and people.

The East Roman Empire had nearly half a millennium to run, but when it was dissolved, the idea took hold in some Russian quarters of Moscow as the third Rome.

Kievan Rus dissolved into a collection of principalities and fell to the Mongols circa 1240; but Novgorod, which had in 1136 become not a principality but a republic, was, unlike Moscow, spared a Mongol invasion.

The Grand Principality (or Grand Duchy) of Moscow, plain Muscovy to the English, was established in 1283 and evolved out of the Grand Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. It extinguished the Novgorod Republic in 1478, ceased to be a tributary of the Golden Horde in 1480 and lasted until the Tsardom was proclaimed in 1547.

The Rurik dynasty, which dominated Kievan Rus, also supplied the Grand Princes of Vladimir and of Moscow – and the first two Tsars, Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1547-84) and Feodor I (reigned 1584-98).

The Russians believed that the apostle Andrew travelled up the Dnieper River and reached the future location of Kiev, where he erected a cross on the site where the St Andrew’s Church of Kiev now stands and where he prophesied the foundation of a great Christian city.

Since 2014, Chersonesus has been controlled by Russia. Russia uses Chersonesus’s history to justify its annexation of the Crimea.

The New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts began in 1924. Bernstein ran the orchestra from 1958 to ’69, and the Young People’s Concerts from ’58 to ’72: he conducted and spoke at 53, all televised on CBS.

This came from Lincoln Center on February 19 1965, Friday, at the start of the Sibelius centenary year (2015 is Sibelius 150). It’s the first of four clips.

He introduces Sibelius and performs Finlandia “in honour of Sibelius and of the free people of Finland”.

He then introduces the violin concerto and the man who is about to perform it, Sergio Luca.

Clip 2: Concerto, first movement. Fiery, yes, but it is hard to say why this is so much less involving than, say, Oistrakh. Clip 3: introduces the second symphony. The kind of lesson a child might remember for the rest of his life. Sibelius is much more than a nationalist composer, but “to the people of Finland [the] ending will always mean only one thing: freedom”. Clip 4: last movement of the second symphony.

Finlandia (1899-1900) was nakedly, embarrassingly, political. So obvious was its meaning that the Russians forbade performances (at what date?). It had to masquerade under names such as Happy Feelings at the Awakening of the Finnish Spring and A Scandinavian Choral March.

Perhaps the Russians banned it not only because it would whip up national feeling, but because it might sap their own will to govern. The music is telling them that they will lose. Though, in the event, it was Russia’s collapse which gave the Finns their chance.

It was composed for a three-day money-raising event for the press pension fund which was also a covert protest against increasing censorship from the Russian Empire. It was the last of six pieces performed (on November 4 1899) as an accompaniment to tableaux depicting episodes from Finnish history.

We have looked at one such set of tableaux in connection with his Karelia music. The Musiikkia sanomalehdistön päivien juhlanäytäntöön (Music for the Press Celebrations Days) had:

Preludio

Tableau 1 – Väinämöinen Delights Nature with His Song (arranged in 1911 as no 1, All’overtura, in Scènes historiques No 1)

Tableau 4 – The Finns in the Thirty Years’ War (arranged in 1911 as no 2, Scena, in Scènes historiques No 1)

Tableau 5 – The Great Hostility

Tableau 6 – Finland Awakes (arranged and performed in 1900 as Finlandia)

There appears to be one or more performing versions of the whole work.

Tableau names may not be exactly as in 1899. Some of the history is in recent posts.

Väinämöinen is the magician-hero of the Kalevala.

Christianity had started to gain a foothold in Finland during the eleventh century. The church in Finland was still in its early development in the twelfth century.

The Finns are Baptised referred to the mission of Bishop Henrik, who became Finland’s patron saint. It seems that he was English (if he existed) and had come to Sweden in 1154 under the protection of the English papal legate in Scandinavia, Nicholas Breakspeare, the future Pope Adrian IV. He was sent from Uppsala to organise the church in Finland and was martyred there.

Finns had their own chiefs, but probably no central authority. Several secular powers wanted to bring the Finns under their rule: Sweden, Denmark, Novgorod, and probably the German crusading orders as well. Another Englishman, Bishop Thomas, became the first bishop of Finland (1234-45). From roughly 1249 until 1809 Finland was under the control of Sweden.

Duke Johan ruled Finland from 1556 to ’63 and was the future King John III of Sweden. He had Catholic leanings.

The Great Hostility refers to the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden.

Finland Awakes was arranged in 1900 as Finlandia and performed on July 2 in Helsinki by the Helsinki Philharmonic Society conducted by Robert Kajanus.

(A second set of Scènes historiques appeared in 1912, but has nothing to do with the press celebrations and as far as I can see does not illustrate particular events. In 1898, he had produced a King Christian II Suite, a selection from his incidental music for the historical play King Christian II, written by his Swedish friend Adolf Paul, about the love of a king for a commoner. Cf Hugo’s Ruy Blas.)

On a spring morning in the Worcestershire countryside in 1901, at his house Craeg Lea in Malvern Wells, Edward Elgar, aged 44, seated at his piano, heard his friend Dora Penny arriving downstairs for a visit and called to her: “Child, come up here. I’ve got a tune that will knock ’em – knock ’em flat.” (Michael Kennedy) Elgar played her the tune that would become known as Land of Hope and Glory.

One wonders whether Sibelius, two years earlier, had said something similar when he came up with the tune which knocked the Finns flat. Two highly unlikely extremities of European music, Finland and England, came up with sensational tunes in the same years.

Finlandia owed nothing to folk music. It was an original tune. Sibelius claimed, or others have done, that his music in general owed nothing to folk tunes. Elgar positively disliked English folk music – which must have placed a barrier between him and Vaughan Williams.

Neither Elgar’s march nor Sibelius’s symphonic poem, if one can call it that (did he?), was written for words (I can’t think of a “symphonic poem” with words). Finlandia’s were written in 1941 by Veikko Antero Koskenniemi. Surprisingly late if that date is correct – and at the start of the Continuation War. The words of the tune which Elgar came to detest (I suppose mainly when sung) were added almost immediately, in 1902, at the suggestion of Edward VII, and were by AC Benson. At least two Christian hymns have adopted the tune of Finlandia. So did the anthem, Land of the Rising Sun, of the short-lived (1967-70) ex-Nigerian state of Biafra.

The Finlandia tunebeing sung by IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra) in Mexico City:

Финля́ндский вокза́л, Finlyandsky vokzal, was the station in Petrograd serving Helsinki and Vyborg to which Lenin returned to Russia via Finland from exile in Switzerland on April 3 1917 (Gregorian), after the February Revolution and ahead of the October Revolution.

It was owned and operated by Finnish railways until early 1918, when the last train, carrying station personnel and equipment, as well as some of the last Finns escaping revolutionary Russia, left for Finland.

Later, the Finns gave it to Russia and the Russians gave them property in Finland, including the Alexander Theatre in Helsinki.

It was the equivalent of Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran into which Khomeini flew from Paris in a chartered plane on February 1 1979.

During the July Days, Lenin had to flee to Finland for safety to avoid arrest. He returned again, disguised as a railway worker, on August 9.

This is a rather cheap headline, since I am not suggesting that we need to change our opinion of Sibelius.

In 1930 – four years into his “silence” if you take Tapiola as his last substantial work – Sibelius wrote a patriotic march for unison male choir and piano with words by Aleksi Nurminen called Karelia’s Fate. YouTube has a not very attractive rendition with a single tenor, and with a translation of the text. Arrangement by Hannu Jurmu, performers not stated.

Finland has not been judged harshly for its collaboration with Germany from 1941 to ’44 because it was a small nation which was defending itself against the USSR – which had invaded it in 1939. The history is in recent posts.

It had accumulated sympathy in ’39-40 not least because Russia had been an enemy of the West, which it had ceased to be in 1941. Finland stood alone against Russia and then got help from Germany.

Sibelius has suffered no political stigmas, but he did not take a stand against the Nazis. Karelia’s Fate was written in support of the fascist or near-fascist Lapua movement.

This was a nationalist, Lutheran, anti-communist political movement founded in 1929 and named after the town of Lapua in the southwest. Southern Ostrobothnia had been a stronghold of the White army in the Civil War.

On June 16 1930, 3,000 men arrived in Oulu in order to destroy the printing press and office of the Communist newspaper Pohjan Voima, whose last issue had appeared on June 14. On the same day, a Communist printing press in Vaasa was destroyed.

A Peasant March to Helsinki on July 7 was a show of power. Meetings held by leftist and labour groups were violently interrupted.

The song is an appeal to the “man of Karelia” to rise up against communism. It was first performed at Sortavala, Karelia, on the northern tip of Lake Ladoga, on September 7 1930.

What man of Karelia? The East Karelian who was living under communism? The West Karelian who was being infiltrated by it? Karelians in general? It depends on how you read it, but I think the phrase “western brothers” merely refers to non-Karelian Finns.

The creation of a Greater Finland by the annexation of East Karelia was an aim of Finnish nationalists.

The poem veers between the second and first person plural vocative, at least in the translation on YouTube.

Sibelius’s well-known Karelia music belongs to another world, that of late nineteenth-century romantic nationalism.

In 1893, when Finland was part of Russia, Sibelius was commissioned to write music for a historical tableau about Karelia at the Imperial Alexander University in Vyborg. This was in connection with a lottery being held to promote the education of the people of Vyborg Province. Raucous premiere November 13, Sibelius conducting.

The sections:

Overture

Tableau 1 – A Karelian Home – News of War (1293)

Tableau 2 – The Founding of Viipuri Castle

Tabelau 3 – Narimont, the Duke of Lithuania, Levying Taxes in the Province of Käkisalmi (1333)

Narimont or Narimantas of Lithuania ruled the Russian part of Karelia on behalf of Novgorod.

Karl Knutsson is Charles VIII of Sweden.

Pontus de la Gardie was a French general in the service of Sweden. He captured Käkisalmi on the northwestern shore of Lake Ladoga from Ivan the Terrible. The Swedes held it for seventeen years. They took it again in 1611 and held it for a hundred years.

The words and music of the Finnish de facto national anthem are mid-nineteenth century. They predate independence. Sibelius’s Finlandia (1899-1900) has joined it as a second de facto anthem.

Sibelius published the three-movement suite and also, separately, the overture. There are performing versions of the rest.

Overture, London Symphony Orchestra, Loris Tjeknavorian; it quotes the march (for a second at 0:42, repeated at 6:08, he seems about to enter the world of Elgar):

Karelia’s story involves the medieval contest between the Catholic Kingdom of Sweden and the Orthodox Novgorod Republic (old post), the rise of Protestant Sweden in the century from Gustavus Adolphus to Charles XII, the rise of Orthodox Russia in the two centuries from Peter the Great to the revolution, and Protestant Finland’s relations with Russia after 1917.

The Gulf of Finland (as Toynbee might have said) is a backwater of the Baltic, which is a backwater of the North Sea, which is a backwater of the North Atlantic; the White Sea is a backwater of the Barents Sea, which is a backwater of the Arctic Ocean.

Between the Gulf of Finland and the White Sea are Karelia and two large lakes, Ladoga and Onega. Between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga is the Karelian Isthmus (capital Vyborg or Viipuri, recent post) – but Karelia itself is, in a way, an isthmus between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

(The other Finnish Gulf is that of Bothnia, between it and Sweden.) Most of Karelia is now a Republic in Russia. North of Russian Karelia is Murmansk Oblast.

Karelia now:

The White Sea-Baltic Canal (Балти́йский кана́л, Byelomorsko-Baltiyskiy Kanal, BBK), or White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal), a ship canal built by forced labour from gulags under the first Five Year Plan, was opened on August 2 1933; it makes use of the Svir River, which flows from Onega to Ladoga, and the Neva, which flows from Ladoga to St Petersburg:

Traditional divisions, with the current border:

Olonets Larelia and White Karelia are also called East Karelia. The rest is also called West Karelia. Ingria is the old name for the head of the Gulf of Finland between the Karelian Isthmus and Estonia, including the territory around St Petersburg.

Most of Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden from the thirteenth century to 1809, when the Finnish-speaking areas of Sweden were ceded to the Russian Empire and became the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Grand Dukes were the Russian Tsars. Finland broke away in 1917.

Karelia’s story involves the medieval contest between the Catholic Kingdom of Sweden and the Orthodox Novgorod Republic (old post), the rise of Protestant Sweden in the century from Gustavus Adolphus to Charles XII, the rise of Orthodox Russia in the two centuries from Peter the Great to the revolution, and Protestant Finland’s relations with Russia after 1917.

Karelia was bitterly fought over by the Swedes and the Novgorod Republic in the thirteenth-century Swedish-Novgorodian Wars. The Treaty of Nöteborg in 1323 regulated the Swedish-Novgorodian border and divided Karelia between the two powers. Vyborg (Finnish: Viipuri), founded by the Swedes in 1293, became the capital of the Swedish province. North Karelia, Ladoga Karelia and East Karelia were under Novgorod.

In the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617 Novgorod’s successor Russia ceded Ladoga Karelia and North Karelia to Sweden. East Karelia remained Orthodox and under Russian supremacy.

In the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 Sweden ceded Ladoga Karelia and the Isthmus to Russia. This ended Sweden’s four hundred-year supremacy in the Isthmus.

Russia won Finland, in turn, from Sweden in 1809. The new acquisition was known as New Finland. The territories won in 1721 (and in a subsequent war in 1741-43) were Old Finland. They were combined into the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland (1809-1917). The Russians moved their capital from Turku, until that point the most important city in Finland, east to Helsinki in 1812.

In the nineteenth century an ideology of Karelianism took hold of Finnish artists and researchers, who believed that the Orthodox East Karelians had retained elements of an archaic, original Finnish language and culture, neither Swedish nor Slavic, which had disappeared from Finland.

In the sparsely populated East Karelian backwoods, especially in White Karelia, Elias Lönnrot collected the folk tales that he forged into Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala (earliest publication 1835; Kullervo is one of its characters). Scholars argue about how much of the Kalevala is genuine folk poetry and how much is Lönnrot’s own work, but don’t dismiss it as a mere Poems of Ossian.

The Karelian language is closely related to Finnish, though the variety spoken in East Karelia is usually seen as a distinct language.‪‬ ‬‬‬

Finland won its independence in 1917. Until Russia invaded in 1939-40, its territory included the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga regions.

The idea of annexing East Karelia to Finland to make a Greater Finland was widely supported between the wars. Finnish partisans tried but failed to overthrow the bolsheviks in East Karelia in 1918-20.

With the end of the Russian Civil War and the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, East Karelia became (1923) the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Capital Petrozavodsk, on Lake Onega.

The Finnic peoples that made up most of the population of East Karelia were promised far-reaching cultural rights, but these rights were never realised. Stalin persecuted ethnic Finns and began an intensive Russification programme.

West Karelia was Finnish east of the brown line until the Winter War of 1939-40 and remains Finnish west of the line; although some of the ceded territories were incorporated into Leningrad Oblast, it is not clear why the pre-1940 area of Leningrad should be purple:

The war ended on March 13 1940. Russia joined Ladoga Karelia and the Isthmus to the territory of the ASSR to form a new Karelo-Finnish Soviet (Federative?) Socialist Republic, thus promoting Karelia to a union republic within the USSR (1940-56).

Areas ceded to Russia in 1940 and again in 1944; the northern areas are not part of Karelia, nor are four islands in the Gulf of Finland:

The entire Karelian population of the areas ceded in the Winter War, over 400,000 people, mainly Lutheran, was evacuated to Finland, and the territories were settled by people from other parts of the Soviet Union. It is unclear whether Russia hoped after this to conquer the whole of Finland.

On June 22 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Three days later the Continuation War (to give it the Finnish name; for the Russians it was a front of the Great Patriotic War) started.

With German assistance, the Finns hoped to recover the territories lost in 1940. Many of the evacuees returned home, only to be re-evacuated in 1944.

Finnish forces also occupied most of East Karelia. The occupation was accompanied by hardship for the local ethnic Russian civilians, including forced labour and internment in prison camps.

Finland lost the Continuation War. An armistice was signed on September 19 1944. The border of the Moscow Peace Treaty of 1940 was recognised by Finland again in the Peace of Paris of 1947.

In 1956 the SSR was downgraded from a Union Republic to an ASSR, and retroceded to the Russian SFSR.

Finland was neutral during the Cold War and showed a degree of deference and self-censorship towards the USSR. The Germans called this effect of Russia, not only in Finland, Finnlandisierung.

The Finns ceased to dream of the annexation of East Karelia. Their demands for the return of the ceded territories were muted.

On November 13 1991, the Karelian ASSR became the Republic of Karelia, a subdivision of the Russian Federation.

Since the fall of communism, there has been a revival in Finnish culture in East Karelia. Some in Finland campaign for the return of the ceded territories, but the demand has never been part of government policy.

Finland joined the EU in 1995 and Eurozone in 2002. The old currency had been the markka. It is not a member of NATO.

In early Christianity, the souls of the dead were believed to enter a limbo during the interlude between the material world and the Last Judgement. Tertullian (160-240) wrote of a refrigerium interim, before their awakening to damnation or to glory.

But this refrigerium did not encourage anxiety or the giving of money to the Church.

In the later view, whose evolution and theology Brown traces from the time of Cyprian of Carthage, martyred 258, to that of Julian, Bishop of Toledo under the Visigoths, late seventh century, the journey to heaven began immediately (where did that leave the Last Judgement?) and the soul needed to be encouraged on its way.

“The wealthy – and that far wider group who wished to imitate the wealthy – sought to protect, nourish, and eventually bring home to heaven their own souls and the souls of the deceased” by pious practices, gifts and endowments. (Brown quoted in Donoghue)

You gave so that the prayers might continue after your death. Ancient euergetism. Christian giving. Foundations of medieval Church. Spain to Babylon, North Africa to Ireland. The soul’s destiny could be changed by what was happening on earth post mortem. The phrase “pray for the soul of …” puzzled me as a child. Surely it was too late.

The phrase comes from Proverbs 13:8: “The ransom of the soul of a man is his wealth.” What does that mean? Commentary. It was a phrase much used in the Middle Ages, but only two or three times, Brown tells us, in the period with which he is dealing, and towards the end, so he nearly did not use it.

In Matthew 19:21 and Luke 12:33 Christ seems to say that we can store treasure in heaven through almsgiving, ie gain a spiritual reward for financial generosity.

How much giving to the poor was direct, unmediated through the Church?

While a Medieval Western vernacular poetry adopted from a contemporary Arabic poetry the device of rhyme, which could be applied to accentual verse as readily as to quantitative, it is noteworthy that the Medieval Western vernacular poets were not inveigled by their admiration for their Arabic models into doing violence to the genius of their own mother tongues by going on to borrow from the Arabic a quantitative basis of versification which was common to the Arabic school and the Hellenic.

Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages, in part under the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus. Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively from the first development of literary Arabic in the sixth century, as in their long, rhyming qasidas.

First post (obits). I have linked to Alan Macfarlane of King’s College, Cambridge before. Here’s a ninety-minute interview of Chadwick by him, recorded in 2008.

I can only describe Chadwick’s smile as papery. From many years in a college. In my late teens I asked for the two volumes of his monumental The Victorian Church for Christmas, to the puzzlement of my family. At school I had had to read, and enjoyed, even if it lacked a certain drama, his The Reformation in the Pelican History of the Church, which he edited and to which he also contributed a volume on the Cold War. His younger brother Henry wrote the one on the early church, RW Southern a fine one on the medieval church.

He mentions DC Somervell in the first part, the man whose abridgements of Toynbee appeared in 1946 and 1957, as his history teacher at Tonbridge. He tells us that Toynbee’s early volumes were coming out then and that Somervell was rather contemptuous of him. But the first three then-uncontroversial volumes were only published in the summer of 1934. And would Somervell have said this? Especially when he wrote to Toynbee on September 11 to say that he had found them “enthrallingly interesting”? I wonder if this is not an academic reflex. Chadwick returns to Toynbee in the second part to show his own disapproval.

Macfarlane’s is a civilised voice, but he doesn’t get all that much out of his subject. But the picture in the Guardian shows Chadwick looking younger at 98 than he does here.

The discussion touches on Cambridge historians: Lord Acton (I met Chadwick at a lunch given for the launch of Roland Hill’s biography of Acton, which Chadwick in some degree mentored), GM Trevelyan, David Knowles, JH Plumb, Hugh Trevor-Roper (who was succeeded at Peterhouse by another ex-Christ Church figure, Henry Chadwick), Peter Laslett, Noel Annan, GR Elton. And others, such as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

“The Balkans might be better off at the moment if one or two people like David Owen or Lord Ashdown had known some history.”

Owen and Henry were both ordained Anglicans who were historians. Henry had a theological bent and wrote about the early church. Owen wrote mainly about religion, and the friction of church and state, in the nineteenth century.

Owen read history at St John’s, Cambridge and after the war was made a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Master of Selwyn College, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Regius Professor of Modern History, and was for two years Vice Chancellor of the University.

Henry went to Eton and then Magdalene, Cambridge on a music scholarship, and after the war became a fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Dean of Christ Church, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and then Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge, making him the first person in four centuries (since whom?) to have headed a college at both universities.

The Russian Empire will never become an industrial and commercial power; but like every other unit in the new international World she has need of a free outlet to the high seas, through which she may transmit to foreign markets the raw produce of her vast continental hinterland, and supply herself with the manufactured goods of industrial countries in return.

Such outlets she has never yet obtained. Till the eighteenth century her only port was Archangel on the White Sea, and this perhaps sufficed her during the era of stagnant isolation: at any rate the English Merchant Adventurers found it worth their while to trade there, though it is ice-bound two-thirds of the year. [Footnote: From about October to May.] In the year 1700, the Baltic was a Swedish lake, and the Black Sea a Turkish one. Peter and Catherine broke the maritime monopoly of these two powers, and gave Russia a sea-board on both waters. Odessa [now in Ukraine] and Riga [now in Latvia] have grown in a century and a half to be magnificent ports, and would suffice in themselves for the needs of a Russia much more highly developed than the present. But they are no more in direct communication with the Oceanic highways of international commerce than are the ports of Milwaukee and Chicago on the Great Lakes.

The disaster [of the “Babylonish Captivity”] lay in the “capture” of the Papacy by the French Crown, and not in the scene of the “captivity”; for the metaphorical Babylon on the banks of the Rhone was much better placed than the metaphorical Zion on the banks of the Tiber for serving the fourteenth-century Papal Curia as a centre for the administration of an ecclesiastical empire which extended at the time from Sicily to Ireland and from Portugal to Finland.

Most of Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden from the thirteenth century to 1809, when the Finnish-speaking areas of Sweden were ceded to the Russian Empire and became the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Grand Dukes were the Russian Tsars.

Finland broke away in 1917. The passage below was published in 1915. My interjections are not summaries of omitted passages.

Finland, from its Swedish background, is Lutheran. Finnish nationalism emerged in the nineteenth century, based on Finnish cultural traditions and the Finnish language. The Fennoman movement met a Swedish cultural resistance in the Svecoman movement.

Finnish, like Estonian, Livonian, Hungarian and some northwest Siberian languages, is part of the Finno-Ugric family.

Between [Norway] and the Russian frontier a broad barrier was interposed by Finland, so long as she remained a Swedish province, but the settlement of 1814 endorsed an accomplished fact by bringing Finland within the Russian Empire as a self-governing national state under the Imperial crown, with much the same status as the constitutional kingdom of Poland. During the whole century that has elapsed, there has been a silent contest on Russia’s part to press her way over Finland’s carcase to a Norwegian port on the open Atlantic, and on the part of the Scandinavian powers, backed by Great Britain, to maintain the existing arrangement of constitutions and frontiers.

To fortify the Scandinavian peninsula against Russian encroachment, the Vienna Congress linked its two discordant nationalities [Sweden and Norway] together by a personal union [old post]. This experiment had a more successful history than the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which the same Congress welded together as a bulwark against France [and which split into Belgium and Holland]; but it collapsed finally, none the less, nine years ago, [footnote: In 1905.] while on the other side Russia has been levelling her path by a systematic attempt to crush Finnish nationality out of existence.

Two countries, whether in a union or not, lay between Russia and the Atlantic: Sweden and Norway. But the Norwegian ports to which Russia wanted access were, according to this passage, in the far north, where Norway bordered directly on Russian Finland.

Wikipedia (edited here) summarises the period of the Grand Duchy thus:

1809-62: fifty years of consolidation, during which the Finnish authorities succeeded in convincing the Russian court not only of their own loyalty, but of that of all Finns.

1863-98: thirty-five years of increased independence, including the re-establishment of the Diet of Finland and the elevation of Finnish from a language for the common people to a national language (1863) equal to Swedish (1883). The catastrophic Finnish famine of 1866-68 was followed by eased economic regulations and extensive emigration: yet another nineteenth-century diaspora.

1899-1917: twenty years of attempted russification, ultimately unsuccessful and detrimental for Finland’s relationship with the Russian Empire (and the Soviet Union that was formed shortly afterwards).

In their politics and social life the Finns are one of the most highly-civilised nations of Europe. The smallness of their population [footnote: The census taken in 1901 showed a total of 2,713,000, including 2,353,000 Finns, 350,000 Swedes, 10,000 others.] and the unindustrialised character of their economics have simplified the problems set them to solve, but within their modest dimensions they have solved them to perfection. The tradition of their culture, and their Lutheran religion, both come from Sweden, and the townspeople on the coast are still largely Swedish in race and language; but since the political connection with Sweden has been broken, the native Finnish speech, which belongs to a non-Indo-European family, though enriched with many primitive Teutonic loan words, has raised its head and proved itself to possess enough vitality to become the vehicle of national development.

With Russia Finland has no inward bonds of union whatsoever, neither of religion nor of language nor of tradition nor even of geography, for she lies away in a corner, and her sea-board, besides fronting merely upon the Baltic, is much less accessible from the Russian hinterland than are the outlets upon the Baltic, White Sea and Black Sea which Russia possesses elsewhere.

Finland has simply been the victim of Russia’s ambition for an open port on the Norwegian coast, because the eventual railway to that port must run through her territory. It is a precise repetition of the relations between the Magyars and Croatia. A small nationality has been inalienably endowed by Geography with the fatal function of standing between a powerful nation and a sea-board to which she ardently desires access: the stronger power has been so stupid and barbarous as to imagine no better means of satisfying her wants than the destruction of the little nation that stands in the way of their realisation; and the latter, fighting desperately for life, is looking round for some strong helper who will bring the oppressor to his knees, set her free from all connection with him, and shatter for ever his projects, for which she has suffered so terribly.

There would be poetical justice in such a consummation, for it would be the natural outcome of the bullying power’s behaviour; but it would not solve the problem at issue, but only bring forth evil from evil, reversing instead of eliminating the injustice and sowing the seeds of future war.

We have seen that if we win this war, and the Dual Monarchy collapses, Croatia will probably achieve complete political freedom from Magyar tyranny [she did, within a southern Slavic federation], but that she must not, in such an event, be allowed to use her advantage merely to take the offensive in the racial feud: she must give Hungary facilities for realising all her legitimate political desires by entering into economic co-operation with her. But the same issue of the war, for which we hope, will not effect the forcible liberation of Finland, and this imposes all the more urgently upon us the duty of securing that, when the settlement comes, Finland shall obtain as much and more from the justice, good sense and liberalism of our victorious ally Russia, as she would have obtained from her compulsory resignation in the event of defeat.

[…]

What was the Atlantic port to which Russia wanted access?

[We must include] in the European settlement some such terms as follows:

(i.) The perpetual integrity and independence of both Norway and Sweden shall be guaranteed by Europe.

(ii.) In return for this, Norway shall allow Russia to lead a railway of Russian gauge across Finland and up the left bank of the Tornea River to some perennially open port on her North-West coast, either Tromsö or Hammerfest or both, according to the lie of the land, without interposing a customs-barrier at any point along this route between the Russian frontier and the open sea.

In 1915, the need to use a port usually led to a desire to control the intervening land.

Russia has always been obsessed with gaining ports, in the Atlantic, Baltic, Sea of Azov, Black Sea, Aegean, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Sea of Japan, Sea of Okhotsk. I assume that the railway was never built. The discussions were presumably forgotten in the cataclysm of 1917.

But would Tromsø or Hammerfest have been any use to it?

The answer is that they were genuine warm-water ports, ice-free throughout the year, thanks to the Gulf Stream and despite Hammerfest being the most northerly full-scale town in the world. And they offered an Atlantic outlet, which made them seem important while Germany was threatening the Baltic. Ports much further south – some on the Baltic, for example, or Okhotsk, on the Sea of Othotsk – are not always ice-free. (Vladivostock, on the Sea of Japan, is.)

[…]

We must trust the future of Finland to Russia’s good faith and good sense. In opening to her a free railway across Finland to a free port on the Norwegian coast, we eliminate her chief motive for trampling the Finnish nation to death, and this is all that we can do. We have already convinced ourselves that the ultimate solution of the national questions of Europe, and therewith the establishment of European peace, depends not upon mechanical adjustments, but upon a change of heart in the nations themselves. If we cannot obtain a reversal of Russia’s attitude towards Finland by negotiating her Atlantic railway, we cannot artificially produce the desired result by forcing her to submit to a guarantee [with Europe as the guarantor].

[…]

So he wants European guarantees for Norway and Sweden, but feels that a European guarantee will not suffice to force it to change its policy towards Finland.

He imagines a critic saying that

“Russia, if she is compelled once and for all to resign to Germany the naval command of the Baltic, will not submit to the lack of any naval sally-port whatsoever upon the Western seas, but will attempt to repeat on her railway to the Norwegian coast the policy she devised at the beginning of the century in Manchuria. She will seek to turn her free port into a fortified naval base, and the danger of Tromsö or Hammerfest developing into an Atlantic Port Arthur may finally wreck the good understanding between Russia and Great Britain, and involve the latter power in a war for the stronghold’s destruction as costly as the sieges of Sebastopol and of Port Arthur itself. Such may be the consequences of indecision now. In the question of the Baltic the future peace of all the European powers is at stake.”

His answers are part of an argument about how to allow Russia what she needs in the Baltic without unduly humiliating Germany: a more important question, in his opinion, than that of her access to the Atlantic.

Russia had become a Baltic power when Peter the Great defeated Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War. By 1920 it had only St Petersburg.

In 1917, Finland declared independence: she did not have to wait for the peace settlement. A civil war between Finnish Red Guards (bolsheviks) and White Guards followed, with the Whites, supported by Germany (and some young Swedish, Estonian and Polish volunteers), gaining the upper hand during the spring of 1918.

On April 13 1918 German troops captured Helsinki (Helsingfors in Swedish). The plan was to erect a German monarchy (YouTube has its proposed anthem), with Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse as king. But Germany collapsed and on July 17 1919 Finland became a republic.

___

Russian Baltic ports

St Petersburg was Russian from its foundation in 1703

Reval (Tallinn) and Riga were Russian from 1710 (captured from Sweden), part of independent Estonia and Latvia (the territories north of Lithuania used to be called Livonia) from 1918, with Russia again from 1940, in independent states again from 1991

Lithuania’s largest port, Memel (Klaipėda), did not have a long Russian history; it was in the northernmost corner of East Prussia; it passed into Allied hands in 1919 and then, in 1923, to newly-independent Lithuania; was reclaimed by Germany in 1939 and was part of Soviet Lithuania from 1945 to 1991

Vyborg, in Karelia, a minor port, was Russian from 1710 (captured from Sweden), part of independent Finland from 1918 to 1940, was fought over during Finland’s war with Russia, and has been Russian since 1944

Kaliningrad, like Memel, was an East Prussian city (Königsberg), port area Baltiysk (Pillau); it was captured by the Red Army in 1945 and has been a Russian enclave, between Poland and Lithuania, ever since.

___

About 37,000 people died in the short Finnish Civil War, most of them Reds; this may be a White victory march

What Elgarian, even, knew of this recording of the Finnish National Orchestra, under Georg Schnéevoigt, playing Cockaigne at the Queen’s Hall in 1934?

They play as if they mean it. Peroration at 2:37. They get the Edwardian grandeur. The work had been premiered at Queen’s Hall in 1901. Finnish National Orchestra seems to be an old name for the Helsinki Philharmonic. Robert Kajanus had founded the ensemble in Russian days, in 1882, and ran it until 1932. (That makes him more or less the longest-serving director of an orchestra ever, tying with Ansermet and Mravinsky.) Kajanus was Sibelius’s champion in Finland. Schnéevoigt was his successor with the orchestra, but has never had his reputation.

This was its first visit to London. There is something political in their playing. In 1917 Finland had freed itself, after 108 years, from Russia, and returned to the West. But it did not return to Sweden; it became a nation. In the same way, every recorded performance by Paderewski is political. Of course, Finland’s absorption into Russia had given it the cultural charge which was released in part in Sibelius’s music. You can even hear Tchaikovsky in early Sibelius.

The clip is May or June 1934. Elgar had died in February. (He had made his second recording of the work, with the BBC SO, at Abbey Road in April ’33. It was his last appearance there, a mere 29 years before the Beatles’ first.)

The last of Sibelius’s five visits to England, to conduct English orchestras, had been in 1921. During the ’30s England became the second home of his music. Hamilton Harty and Cecil Gray championed him. The Columbia Graphophone (sic) Company issued recordings of the first two symphonies with the LSO under Kajanus in 1930. The HMV Sibelius Society issued other recordings by subscription, starting with symphonies three and five and Tapiola, LSO and Kajanus again, in 1932.

During the 1934 visit, the Finns performed five of the symphonies and recorded (through the Society?) at least numbers four and six. In the same year, Constant Lambert published his Music Ho!, A Study of Music in Decline, which ends with a long defence of Sibelius. It was Sibelius who could show the way forward.

Henry Wood gave all seven symphonies in the 1937 Proms. Thomas Beecham mounted a festival of six Sibelius concerts in 1938. Barbirolli took him up.

It was different in Germany. As far as I know, Klemperer and Furtwängler never recorded a Sibelius symphony. His reputation was also set back by Theodor Adorno. It was rescued, a little later, by Karajan (cf Kajanus). But Abbado never did Sibelius in Berlin; Rattle has had to reintroduce him. (I’m not much of a Sibelian either, come to that.)

Russia invaded Finland in 1939. We and the French proposed to enter the Winter War in support of Finland during our own Phoney War, but did not, because of difficulties with Norway and Sweden. Two years later, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been broken, we found ourselves on opposite sides in the so-called Continuation War, though the Finns said that they tolerated German troops on their soil only as a defence against Russia.

The Queen’s Hall opened in 1893 and was destroyed by a German bomb on the night of May 10 1941, hours after a performance by the London Philharmonic under Sargent of the Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius (Muriel Brunskill, Webster Booth, Ronald Stear, Royal Choral Society). Pathé:

We get the Finns again here in Cockaigne. Since at one stage we see London Bridge, I’ll add that 1934 was also the year of Eric Coates’s London Bridge march.

The Hall did not “rise again”. Its Langham Place site, next to the BBC, is now occupied by a cramped concrete hotel, the Saint George’s.